Author, teacher and literary journalist Donna Bailey Nurse, who has been a guest blogger at CBC Books for the month of February, has finished off her two-part blog series about the importance of black literature for young black Canadians. In her second blog post, “Black History Month: Keeping roots alive through YA,” she highlights three books that give black Canadians a sense of where they come from. As she says, if you don’t know your own story, “inevitably you lose sight of who you are.”
The books she mentions are Between Sisters by Adwoa Badoe (Groundwood Books), Blue Mountain Trouble by Martin Mordecai (Scholastic) and Chasing Freedom by Gloria Ann Wesley (Fernwood Publishing). Each novel, in its own way, brings African roots to the forefront, with one novel being set in contemporary Africa, another set in the Caribbean and another based in Nova Scotia at the end of the 18th century. Donna observes that the novels “are preoccupied with struggle, literacy and faith: They tell us where we have been and exactly how to move forward.” Head over to the blog post to read more about Between Sisters, Blue Mountain Trouble and Chasing Freedom.
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